The House That Wouldn’t Die: Chico Mendes Returns to Belém for COP30
As the world gathers in the Amazon to talk about the planet’s future, the home of a murdered rubber tapper rises again to remind everyone what the fight was always about.
Thirty-seven years after his assassination, Chico Mendes is coming back — not as a saint or slogan, but as a house.
In Belém, the city hosting the COP30 Climate Summit in 2025, builders are reconstructing the casa azul, the modest wooden home where the rubber tapper, union leader, and environmental visionary once lived in Xapuri, Acre. The project, led by the Comitê Chico Mendes and supported by the Fundação Banco do Brasil, will become Espaço Chico Mendes na COP30 — a meeting point for Brazil’s traditional and forest peoples inside one of the world’s most exclusive political arenas.
Between 8 and 21 November 2025, the replica will host talks, performances, and workshops at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi’s research campus, turning a symbol of loss into a laboratory of hope.
“Chico represents exactly the spirit we want to bring to Belém,” says Angélica Mendes, his granddaughter and coordinator of the Committee. “The alliance between the peoples of the forest, of the Amazon, of Brazil, and of the world. Our goal is to bring territories and traditional ways of life directly into the center of the global climate discussions.”
The forest’s first diplomat
Born in 1944 in the depths of Acre, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho grew up tapping rubber from wild trees and watching ranchers burn the forest to make way for cattle. In the 1970s, under Brazil’s military regime, he helped organize empates— non-violent blockades where families stood unarmed in front of chainsaws. From those standoffs emerged a radical idea: “extractive reserves”, protected forest areas managed collectively by local communities.
To the outside world he became the face of the Amazon; to his neighbors, he was simply someone who refused to leave.
“At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees,” he said. “Then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”
On 22 December 1988, ranchers shot him dead outside his home. His murder forced Brazil — and the world — to confront the violence behind deforestation. The government later created the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, nearly a million hectares of protected forest.
But the killings never stopped. According to Global Witness, Brazil remains one of the world’s deadliest countries for environmental defenders.
A house as protest
The reconstructed Casa Azul in Belém isn’t nostalgia; it’s strategy. It brings the forest’s story to the frontlines of climate negotiation, challenging the sterile language of “net zero” and “carbon markets.” Inside its wooden walls, discussions will center on Indigenous sovereignty, climate adaptation, and just-transition funding, alongside storytelling and art rooted in Amazonian cosmologies.
In a COP dominated by technocrats, the house offers something untranslatable: the smell of wood, the echo of a life lived among trees, the reminder that the Amazon is not an idea — it’s a home.
The unfinished sentence
Holding COP30 in the Amazon is both historic and hypocritical. Billboards promise sustainability while illegal mining and logging continue upriver. That contradiction makes the Casa Azul a quiet act of rebellion — a physical reminder that Brazil’s climate leadership means nothing if it ignores the people who guard its forests.
Rebuilding Chico’s house is a way of asking: What kind of future are we negotiating when the past still burns?
The answer, perhaps, lies in the spirit that refuses to be buried. Chico Mendes still speaks through those who carry his fight — the rubber tappers, riverine families, quilombolas, Indigenous women, and children for whom the forest is both history and horizon.
His life was proof that environmentalism is never just about nature. It’s about justice.
Location: Campus de Pesquisa do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Belém
Dates: 8 – 21 November 2025
